Storage technology continues to grow in size and decrease in cost. Currently, a typical consumer and many enterprises have many thousands or even millions of different stored media elements. These stored media elements typically include audio, video, image, and other multimedia files. Many of the stored media elements have associated metadata, while some do not. The metadata associated with various stored media will only increase with the proliferation of the stored media and with the use of both the stored media and associated metadata. For instance, companies such as CDDB currently use consumers to add metadata associated with the consumers' stored audio data such as compact disc (CD) recordings. That data is made available to other owners of the same CD recording to populate the information regarding the other CD owners' stored audio data. There are also new technologies that use heuristic algorithms to classify media by using its associated content, e.g. by using sunsets, waterfalls, or portraits in photos to classify the photos by content, or by using voice recognition to classify films by content. Further, more explicit metadata are being added to media elements every day. For instance, tags for the director, publisher, actors, etc., are being added to various digital media to further identify the work.
A user of the stored media, whether in the form of an individual consumer or a large enterprise, faces some challenges when attempting to locate a desired item among many stored media elements. Today, users can search the Internet by using, for example, a general purpose search engine. Additionally, users are beginning to more effectively search their own hard drives and other storage media. These searches are based on a few key words and do not use a robust set of metadata. Moreover, even as the metadata associated with various media elements improves, there is no simple mechanism for finding specific content from among the volumes of stored media, which in some instances, take the form of tens of thousands of audio files, clips, television shows, movies, image files, books, games, personal files and documents that a particular user needs to access at any given time. For instance, a typical home consumer currently has access to personal media players that store a few thousand media elements, e.g., audio files. However, these are only navigable using crude interfaces that are typically far removed from the associative manner in which people typically remember and recall data. Associative storage and recall of data typically involves a temporal component. For instance, I was doing this at that time near when I was doing this other thing.
Moreover, the user interfaces currently associated with large data sets, e.g., stored libraries of music, movies, books, which are the collected works of an equally large number of directors, actors, musicians, writers, etc., are lacking in the ability to quickly find and sort the various data appropriately. These deficiencies of large media devices rival or even surpass the deficiencies of the rudimentary interfaces typical of handheld portable players. For instance, most current home media viewers, tuners, and/or players are controlled by using a remote control. However, A/V component remote controls have not typically been designed, or known, for the ability to manage large data sets.